Tag: Picard

As you might know, we recently released Picard 2.0 stable. One of the major problems with the macOS version of the same is that is very unreliable. It works perfectly on some systems and doesn’t on others with the same macOS version. See PICARD-1212 for example.

Another major problem we are facing is code-signing Picard 2.0. In order to ensure that our macOS users have a seamless experience, we paid for an Apple dev account, but we are unable to code-sign Picard. See PICARD-1296

If you have experience with either and are willing to help, please email us at – support@metabrainz.org or join us on irc at #metabrainz (freenode).

Official MusicBrainz cross-platform music tagger Picard 2.0 is now out, containing many fixes and new features and much needed upgrades!

The last time we put out a major release was more than 6 years ago (Picard 1.0 in June of 2012), so this release comes with a major back-end update. If you’re in a hurry and just want to try it out, the downloads are available from the Picard website.

If you have been following our Picard related blogs, you will know that we switched up our dependencies a bit. Python should now be at least version 3.5, PyQt 5.7 or newer and Mutagen should be 1.37 or newer. A side effect of this dependency bump is that Picard should look better and in general feel more responsive.

A couple of things to note – with Picard 2.0, Picard Windows builds will be portable standalone binaries. Also, we will only be supporting 64-bit Windows officially because of lack of resources to build a 32-bit image. The macOS requirements were also bumped up for the same reasons, with macOS 10.10 being the lowest version that is supported.

As such, Picard 1.4.2 will be the last version that is supported for both Windows 32 and macOS 10.7-10.10. You can find it in the Picard downloads section as well.

We would like to thank all contributors, from all around the world, who helped for this release: Laurent Monin, Sophist, Wieland Hoffmann, Vishal Choudhary, Philipp Wolfer, Calvin Walton, David Mandelberg, Paul Roub, Yagyansh Bhatia, Shen-Ta Hsieh, Ville Skyttä, Yvan Rivierre and also all of our translators!

Be aware that downgrading from 2.0 to 1.4 may lead to configuration compatibility issues – ensure that you have saved your Picard configuration before using 2.0 if you intend to go back to 1.4.

Note: If you are facing errors while tagging releases on Windows, do take a look at this FAQ about SSL errors.

Thank you so much for reporting bugs in our Picard 2.0.0beta1 release. We fixed most of the critical bugs that you guys and gals reported. You can find the beta2 release with the fixes here – Picard 2.0.0.beta2

If you have been following our Picard related blogs, you will know that we decided to release a new stable version of Picard before the beginning of the summer.

To help us, advanced users, translators and developers are encouraged to:

Note – If any of you are seasoned Windows/macOS devs and have experience with PyInstaller, we need some help with PICARD-1216 and PICARD-1217. We also need some help with code signing Picard for OSX. Hit us up on #metabrainz on freenode for more information. We will be very grateful for any help that you may offer!

As the world comes back to life after the summer break, we’re making some changes and expanding our team. First, Roman Tsukanov has decided to not renew his contract with us. During his tenure with MetaBrainz, Roman adopted and released CritiqueBrainz and also wrote our new MetaBrainz web page, which is helping us bring in new supporters. His contributions have been far from trivial — thank you for your efforts, Roman!

Due in part to the new MetaBrainz web site, we’ve got more financial support than ever, and this allows us to replace Roman with two engineers! I’m please to announce that we’re hiring two of our Summer of Code students who just completed the program:

Sambhav Kothari AKA samj1912: Sambhav started hacking on Picard earlier this year and knocked Picard out of dormancy, working towards a new release and then making Picard his Summer of Code project. He completed his project with flying colors and is working towards a major upgrade of Picard. On the MetaBrainz team he is going to look after the new search infrastructure and the maintenance and bug fixing of our Web Service in addition to hacking on Picard. A full plate, for sure!

Param Singh AKA iliekcomputers: About the same time that samj1912 arrived, Param arrived. He expressed interest in working on ListenBrainz — he too dove right in and started making improvements. ListenBrainz had quite a ways to go before he could aim to make a Summer of Code project out of it. Param and I embarked on a journey to revamp and improve the stability of ListenBrainz, which culminated in us releasing the new ListenBrainz beta a few weeks ago. Since then he’s been focusing on his Summer of Code project, which is also now complete. On the MetaBrainz team Param will be looking after ListenBrainz and also the new MetaBrainz web site.

Both Param and Sambhav will officially start working on the MetaBrainz team starting October 1, but I strongly suspect we’ll see them around and hacking on the projects as has become the norm this year.

Updated Picard packages for Ubuntu are available over the official MusicBrainz Ubuntu PPAs. For most users it is recommended to use the stable PPA to install the latest stable release of Picard (1.4.2 at the time of writing this):

For users wanting to try out the latest development release there is also a daily build PPA available. Please note that the current Picard 2.0 development releases are a major update to the codebase and everything is still work in progress, so it might be more unstable then usually. Also due to updated dependencies the Picard 2 daily builds are only available for Ubuntu 17.04 and 17.10.